@wjgbse_9
Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, but. . .
Beanie Babies were deliberately promoted as "instant collectibles" by Ty Warner, as a means to con gullible and unsuspecting buyers into believing that his cheaply-made stuffed toys would have investment value.
Big reveal: Beanie Babies have NO value, because TOO MANY were manufactured.
He made millions of dollars hoodwinking his customers, and became one of the richest individuals in the United States.
The "rare" Beanie Babies were actually oversold inventory which retailers no longer wanted on their shelves; so Ty Warner came up with the marketing campaign that those particular Beanie Babies were going to be "retired."
Result? Beanie "investors" rushed to gobble up all those "retired" stuffed toys, under the mistaken belief that anything being "retired" must eventually mean "rare."
No -- it simply meant that Ty Warner didn't have to pay retailers for returned merchandise -- the Beanie "investors" paid the retailers, and Ty Warner never had to pay a cent in return fees.
Printing "errors" are apparently quite common in Beanie Baby production, resulting from sloppy proof-reading at the time that the labels were originally mass-produced in a Third World country. Instead of correcting these "errors" before or during the printing process, and correcting the error, the Third World printing companies just decided to cut the cost of correction, and permit the "errors" to run through.
Resulting in hundreds of thousands of "rare" Beanie Baby "errors."
However -- items which were manufactured in amounts over 100,000 will never be considered "rare", until over 99.99% them have been destroyed.
Don't believe me? Check out this article from the History Channel --
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-beanie-baby-craze-came-to-a-crashing-end
